Let's Play Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu, Part #3: Giovanni to Lance

So last time I did one of these was just a chronicling of the back half of Kanto. Last night I just breezed through the remainder of the game all the way to its conclusion! I'm not sure if I'm ever going to do an 'epilogue' bit for this let's play, since the game's honestly kinda old, and beyond Mewtwo, I don't think Let's Go has a lot of post-game.

Anyway, after beating Blaine, next up is the gym fight in Viridian City and it's... we get some dialogue with our rival (Gary in my playthrough) talking both in Cinnabar and Viridian about how the gym leader has finally returned, and the gym is opened. So there's a significant amount of way to direct you back to Viridian City if you're not paying attention to the map. It's honestly kind of silly, I feel.

I wish I really had anything to say about the Giovanni battle, but as always (and it's a major complaint I have even from the first generation), the final confrontation with Giovanni is pretty anticlimactic other than the surprise twist and presentation that the mafia boss is actually the final gym leader. The fight itself is also pretty simple, with Giovanni only having four Pokemon in the fight. After Giovanni leaves, we get Blue showing up and talking about how he's going to take over the gym leader status for Viridian City, which is... it's a nice little nod to Blue's status as gym leader in the Johto games, and a nice little conclusion to his small character arc in the Let's Go games. I would've probably preferred him to be a bit more of an ass, but that's just me.

Afterwards it's a walk through towards the Victory Road and Indigo Plateau and... and what's there to say about this whole sequence? The music is epic, if nothing else, and there's a rival fight outside of Viridian City, although at this point his team is utterly unremarkable. Oh, and I think it's at around this point (or is it before the Viridian Gym?) that Professor Oak randomly hands me the mega evolution stones and ring for the kanto starters. With no held item system in this game, mega evolution just sort of happens and for Charizard, you can just choose at any point which one you want. It's... it's something I wasn't expecting and I thought it'd be a post-game thing. Not really going to use it since Let's Go is already such an easy game. Oh, Blue and Oak have a little acknowledgement of "Professor Oak forgot the name of his grandson" meme, with Blue telling us that Oak's just pretending to be senile as a running gag.

Victory Road is as dreary as ever. None of the Victory Roads have ever been particularly memorable other than Unova's, but Kanto's was always particularly drab. The only thing that made the journey through Victory Road interesting is motherfucking Moltres, who I genuinely completely forgot about! I've been playing so much FireRed/LeafGreen in the past couple of years that I forgot that Moltres was originally in Victory Road and not the Sevii Islands.

And then we get the Elite Four! Y'know, after Lorelei's appearance outside of the Rock Tunnel, I thought we were going to get some if not all of the Elite Four getting cameos all over Kanto, in the same way that some of the newer games tended to do. But nope, that's all we got, apparently! My final team into this was Pikachu, Venusaur, Charizard, Butterfree, Nidoking and Gyarados, and... and the Elite Four, at least, is a decent bit of challenge, mostly in the Lorelei and Agatha bits. There are some party changes, with Bruno swapping out his second Onix for a Poliwrath, and Lance, for whatever bizarre reason, having a Seadra in his party. Lance also swaps out one of his Dragonites for a Charizard, Gen-II style.

We do get a fun little sequence where Lance introduces the champion, Professor Oak, complete with a fun usage of Oak's lab theme... until, nope, Oak's still not a fighter, and it's our rival, of course. His team is mostly brand-new, nothing at all like Blue's team in the Red/Blue/Green/Yellow games other than the usage of Jolteon and Pidgeot. That Pidgeot mega-evolves, too! It's... it's honestly a pretty disappointingly simple fight, honestly, with none of his team other than Mega Pidgeot and the very defensive Slowbro giving me any sort of hiccups. I really kinda wished the champion fight was at least challenging, and that they had picked a more interesting selection of Pokemon for him to use.

Oh well. It's a fun ride, the credits are cute, and apparently I unlock "species masters" or whatever, who challenge me with level 75 Pokemon and I have to match them with a single pokemon of that species? It's... it's a bizarre gimmick, honestly, the sort of unnecessary padding for the game makers to brag as end-game content. There's also Cerulean Cave, which is redesigned. Oh, I can also use Charizard, Aerodactyl or Dragonite to literally fly over everyone -- that bit is actually nice and welcome!

Overall, though, Let's Go is... it's an enjoyable game, if nothing else, and being able to play Pokemon on the TV screen for the first time since... shit, Colosseum and XD is a glorious feeling. I've talked about how much I like the walking Pokemon, and how much I dislike how banal and repetitive the Go capture mechanic is. A big fan of some of the new alterations to the game, but not a big fan of the new rival (although I understand why they did him like that) or how insanely hand-holdy the game ends up being at times. It's... it's honestly this weird middle ground where the adventure feels like a genuinely awesome remake of an old classic game... but so much of the original game is changed around and the lack of wild Pokemon battles really hurt the game a fair bit in my opinion. It's a charming game, but at this point, I really can't wait for Sword and Shield!

I guess I'll do a little announcement too -- I've been getting back into the groove of Pokemon so much thanks to this game, and I've decided to rewatch the original anime in Japanese. We'll see how far I go, but expect old-school Pokemon reviews soon!